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Renowned home designer joins modular movement
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
A North Carolina modular homebuilder has partnered with a nationally acclaimed home designer to build custom homes in the Charleston area and in other parts of the Carolinas and Virginia.
HandCrafted Homes of Henderson, N.C., has an agreement with William E. Poole of Wilmington, N.C., to build 10 homes initially over a period of 18 months. The first home will be completed in Charlotte, N.C., by late spring. The timetable and locations for the Charleston area homes have not yet been determined.
Poole’s work includes custom home design as well as furnishings, accessories and building materials.
The Raleigh, N.C., native has more than 40 years’ experience in classical home design and has been published in numerous national magazines including Colonial Homes, House Beautiful and Southern Living.
His designs are published semi-annually in a magazine carrying his name and in a book published annually by Hanley Wood, publisher of Builder magazine. Poole’s homes have been built as far away as Brazil and New Zealand and for average homeowners as well as celebrities such as Tom Selleck.
“Mr. Poole is very meticulous about the details to his homes. He has an eye for detail that not too many designers have,” said Wade Butler, director of sales for HandCrafted Homes.
Poole had been seeking a modular company as a partner and had toured many factories, Butler said.
“We both had common ground,” Butler said. “His belief is that at some point in time in the near future, all homes will be built in the factory because skilled labor is very difficult to come up with. We get phone calls all the time from builders who are tired of fighting the battle of trying to find the (subcontractors) to do the site work.”
Poole and HandCrafted Homes share the same vision for building quality homes, Poole said, and he believes modular homes can be stronger and better than homes built on site.
“The future of homebuilding has got to be in system-built homes, that is, homes built in a manufacturing facility,” Poole said.
“The craftsmen that can really do wonderful work are becoming fewer and fewer every year. There is a real need for a faster way to produce quality-built homes, and I see that as system-built housing, which I think is the future. I wanted to align myself early with the best there is and the people who are building these homes.”
HandCrafted Homes was founded in 1998 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of HHHunt, a major developer of residential and commercial real estate with properties throughout the Southeast.
Builder magazine named HandCrafted Homes among its top 20 modular builders in 2006.
The company built 255 homes in 2005 and grossed $23 million in sales for its factory-built home packages. That figure does not represent the final contract price to the homeowner, because on-site contractors finish the homes.
Last year, the company’s sales were up 22% to a little more than $28 million even as the real estate market softened nationwide. HandCrafted Homes offers public tours of its manufacturing facility on Saturdays.
“We’ll probably build about 400 homes this year, and I’m hoping that we’ll sell a lot in the Charleston area,” Butler said. “We have actually just opened that market up in the past six to nine months.”
Chris Bailey, marketing director for HandCrafted Homes, said the modular industry is growing steadily, making up 5% to 6% of all housing starts compared with 2% to 3% of housing starts about five years ago.
Partnering with a home designer of Poole’s stature will help HandCrafted Homes build houses that are more appealing and functional with a better use of space, Bailey said, and will also help dispel misconceptions about modular building.
“I think it helps bring to light the quality that we’ve been providing for years, but we always tend to be lumped in the same category with manufactured-type homes,” Bailey said. “Structurally, we’ve been building a superior product for years, but when you get lumped into the category of a manufactured home, it’s kind of hard to overcome. Having (Poole’s) name attached to our product definitely enhances the perception that is reality: that we are a superior building method.”
Bailey spent three years in on-site building before joining the modular housing industry, where he has 10 years’ experience.
“I was real reluctant at first to even consider a factory, because I had the same perception as most people,” Bailey said. “I thought modular implied a manufactured-type home, but after my first tour of a building facility, I saw quickly that they were doing not only the equivalent of what I was doing on site, but also a lot of quality control checks and keeping the materials out of the weather.”
HandCrafted Homes are built section-by-section in a 100,000-square-foot facility and are shipped by wide-load trucks to home sites in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland and Tennessee. Shipping expenses make it cost prohibitive to deliver the homes more than about 300 miles from the manufacturing facility. The homes are turned over to local builders when they are about 75% complete.
Bill Murray, general manager of HandCrafted Homes, said the partnership with Poole will transform the system-built industry.
“This partnership will take HandCrafted Homes to a new level while broadening our customer base to include the affluent, sophisticated consumer,” Murray said.
Poole sees his partnership as a serious new step in his career.
“Frankly, it’s a risk I took, because I am a brand,” Poole said. “If I put my name on something that is not a quality item, that lowers my reputation. So this is a new page, but I am very, very comfortable with what we’re doing and very proud of what we’re doing. I think a lot of people are going to be very surprised.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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